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I am often asked how to support social collaboration in the workplace. As I showed in my recent blog post, there are some big differences between learning in an e-business and learning in a social/collaborative business.

So it is not just about adding new social approaches or social media into the training “blend”, supporting social collaboration is underpinned not only by new technologies but by a new mindset. In other words, it means ..

1 – moving from a focus on organising and managing training (which includes e-learning and blended learning) FOR others, to helping individuals and teams address their OWN performance problems.

2 – recognising that most learning already happens in the workplace – informally and socially – as people connect and work with one another – as well as outside the organisation in their professional networks. It means...

You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process.

Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help...

Workplace learning is not just about training – but about supporting learning across the Social Workplace Learning Continuum – and involves both organising structured learning experiences as well as supporting informal learning.

Workplace learning is not (just) about creating content (aka courses), dumping them into a LMS and then just monitoring usage – but is...

It is becoming clear that more and more people are using a variety of ways – not just training – to help them (a) acquire new skills and knowledge as well as (b) learn continuously in their jobs. (You can read more about this in my Learning in the Social Workplace article.)

Here are just ten key ways that people find of value to help them (learn to) do their jobs: …

Here is an updated version (V3) of the WSD Framework with more charts and descriptions, and now available as a PDF to download under a Creative Commons Licence.

Social tools are changing not only the way that professionals are working and learning but also the way that organisations are transforming into social businesses. In the new connected workplace, current training, e-learning or blended learning services, which take a top-down, ”command and control” approach to organising and managing “learning” will not be appropriate to support these new ways of working and learning. What will be required is a completely new range of services – which we might call non-training services – that are focused on supporting continuous performance improvement and learning in the workflow as people do their jobs...

OK, these skills are not actually “new” – they’ve always been present – but perhaps they have not always been as visible as they should have been, as Oscar Berg explains in The collaboration pyramid (or iceberg). But as businesses transform into social businesses, the social workplace is going to become more and more reliant on these skills.

I’ve been working with a number of organisations recently as they’ve been making the move “into social”, and one thing was clear, that “helping” their people didn’t require old-school training. Of course, helping them how to use the technology could be partly approached in this way – but even that wasn’t quite.…

“A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.”(Wikipedia)

I’ve been preparing some extended notes for some presentations about The Social Learning Revolution – in particular how social media is impacting all our working and learning lives, and what this means for the Learning & Development department. I’ve been looking at the following:

How we have traditionally understood “learning” in the workplace and ...

As you will know I finalised the 5th Annual survey of Top 100 Tools for Learning in the middle of November 2011, and at that time placed the presentation on Slideshare. I’ve just noticed that in the subsequent two months it has been viewed over 200,000 times!

You will also know, Twitter topped the list again for the 3rd year running, although in 2008 it was only ranked 11th and in 2007 it was 43rd on the list.

Predictions for an upcoming new year are inevitably based on the “flow” from the current year, so if you have taken a look at my Top 100 articles of 2011 (or even my complete 2011 Reading List), you will not be surprised to hear that many predict that 2012 will be the “Year of Social Business“.

Up to now, for many organisations, Social Business has been about social media marketing and engaging customers, but as IBM explains …

“A Social Business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.”

Following my recent post on the case for a non-training approach (NTA) to workplace learning and the launch of my NTA website, I’ve received quite a bit feedback and read a number of blog posts and comments about it. So I thought I would plot all these reactions on the learning technology adoption curve that my Internet Time Alliance (ITA) colleague, Harold Jarche and I produced last year (which is an adaptation of the one originally produced by Geoffrey Moore).

Firstly, just in case it is not clear, this chart plots organizations along the curve in terms of their use of learning technologies but ...